Facts? Where We’re Going We Don’t Need Facts!

Here’s a great post on the recent media storm on “Benefits Tourism” – a combination of two dependable moral panic issues the government and media like to over-use – Immigration and Benefits. However, the idea of leeching immigrants coming to Britain to take from our already ‘bloated’ benefits bill is entirely fictional. But that’s never stopped them before. Much like the increased penalty for Benefit Fraud a couple of weeks back, the government are solving a problem that hardly exists.

So the European Commission have, for three years, been asking the Cameron government to provide evidence to substantiate his claim that the UK is suffering from a problem of “benefit tourism”. Having received nothing back in response, today they called “Shenanigans“.

As I have discussed on here before, the effects of immigration are overwhelmingly positive to the UK economy. Immigration increases economic growth. Immigration doesn’t increase unemployment. Immigrants contribute 30% more through taxes than they take through public services. In short, we would be doing significantly worse without immigrants.

You will notice that there is a marked difference between the messages I just gave you and the messages that the government sends out when discussing this subject. The biggest difference though, is that my messages are based on evidence and facts as opposed to the creation and fuelling of prejudices. (Read my earlier post, “The Immigration Fallacy”…